Crawlasaurus and Tweet 1

It was supposed to be a nice day out in town.  The weather was beautiful and windy, and the humidity was perfect for transistors.  The idea was to start off in the park playing quantum leapfrog, but it quickly became an argument.

It’s not clear who started the fight, Crawlasaurus or Tweet, but it was over just as quickly.  Crawlasaurus had wanted to be the strange quark, but Tweet also wanted to be the strange quark.  Their arm-wrestling settled that they’d instead be sweet and charm.

They quickly got bored with quantum leap frog, so Crawlasaurus and Tweet decided to go play in the woods.  There were sticks and grass and even crawly bugs whose complex mechanics seemed strange and unfamiliar to the robots’ wheeled expectations.  But while tromping about merrily in the leaves, they came across Louie, a normal guy everyone mistook for a ninja.

Louie very intently told Crawlasaurus the story of how he got a mistaken reputation as a ninja while Tweet fidgeted impatiently, not wanting to be rude.  But Louie was boring, so very, very, very, very, VERY boring that both Crawlasaurus and Tweet wanted to switch off so as to not have to listen to him anymore.  Eventually they escaped by climbing to the top of the nearest mountain.

And descending into the verdant valley beneath.  Tweet had some trouble forging the mighty river of the valley, but eventually made it across unscathed.

Down in the valley on the banks of the river, Crawlasaurus and Tweet were glad to find a sammich shack and promptly got food as all their rollicking and fleeing had worked up quite an appetite.  Crawlasaurus doesn’t have any table manners.

As they wrapped up lunch, Crawlasaurus and Tweet realized that they were about to be late to a meeting all the way across the world.  So they plugged their jet engines into their breadboards and flew like a leaf of lettuce in a hurricane across the ocean to make the meeting just in time.

The meeting went well as their executive design team loved every idea that Crawlasaurus and Tweet pitched for the new line of soda-flavored bathroom tiles.  After the meeting, Tweet went off to the gym while Crawlasaurus had his weekly scheduled therapy session.

No improvement this week.  Still big-wheeled.

Engineering Engineers

Engineering as a discipline seems to traditionally confine its practitioners to a small subset of the world, a little box in which they are fated to become very very good at one very small thing.  This narrow focus gives rise to and perpetuates the myriad stereotypes of the engineer as a social pariah, intensely quiet and self-isolating.  Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Robotics Redefined doesn’t really allow us to become so narrowly focused on any one aspect of a product.  To meet the needs of our customers, we generally have to remain far more flexible than traditional engineering, and luckily we all like that flexibility quite a bit.  Rather than plodding on for one project for years and years and years we get to waltz among different projects from week to week and let our narrow focus entrain in shorter intervals to prevent burn-out, and to increase the visibility of any errors in our prototypes by preventing mathematical myopia.

Disclaimer: by no means do we deride traditional engineering approaches, but we do feel that the flexibility that we maintain is better over both short- and long-terms.  However, it is obviously traditional engineering that presented Bilal with this:

There were no instructions in the box.

Quality Machining

We could write perfect software and spend hundreds of hours tweaking electronic and mechanical design closer towards their optimal solutions, but none of it would matter if the machining of the parts we design were to fail.  The reality is, our efforts are only as good as the machining that goes into them.  Whether it be routing on a PCB or bending 8G aluminum into exact angles, machining matters immensely.  As such, we are quite picky–bordering on obsessive paranoia–when it comes to machined parts.  But it’s not just that, it’s also the aesthetic appreciation of beautifully machined parts; when we see our designs come to life in the form of a perfectly balanced gear so well-cut that it will never even need polishing.

How can one tell shoddy machining from excellent machining?

1. Balance.  If the part has any sort of symmetry in it, there should be perfect balance across that line or point of symmetry.  This is important because otherwise the part will not move evenly and will over time lead to uneven wear, thus decreasing the lifetime of the product its in and increasing its maintenance costs.
2. Edges.  Poorly finished edges mean that parts won’t fit together nearly so well as their engineer intended and that the machine will not function as well as specified.  This is bad.  Poorly finished edges are obvious in burrs or wavering corners along a straight length.  Burrs are absolutely unacceptable, and we will not purchase parts that have them or work with machine shops that produce them ever again.  Burrs are often caused by careless mill/lathe operation and/or dull cutting bits.
3. Holes.  Poorly threaded or poorly fit holes are obvious as soon as you try to fit the corresponding parts through them.  An uneven thread or a shoddily finished countersunken bolt hole sticks out like a sore vegetable and is also unacceptable.  Holes are there for good reason, to fit parts together right, and making them poorly makes the whole product’s quality fall.
4. Radii.  Rounded corners, rounded angles, and rounded bezels are mines of information on how well a part is made.  A common mistake is that the machine operator cuts just slightly too deep into a radius on a corner, leaving a tiny dip in the straight edge instead of a smooth transition into the curve.  Larger radii also bear witness to poor machining in striped bit marks on their outer curvature, which indicates dull bits and/or poor precision in machining.
5. Finish.  Sanded parts are untrustworthy.  If there are slanty edges, shiny spots, or scratches on the part, then it is likely that each of those scars is covering up a badly made mistake on the first cut.

Luckily we found a local machine shop that produces excellent work.  They have an incredibly clean shop (a good indicator of machinists’ attention to detail), and the parts they made for us are simply beautiful.  Perfectly balanced, superbly detailed, and fit together precisely.  A&T Machining Co. Inc. did a superlative job on several geared parts that we ordered, and they even completed them ahead of schedule.  We’ll be happy to work with A&T Machining again in the future, as their quality matches that which we seek to instill in our products.  Simply put, if you need complex parts done well and delivered professionally anywhere in the world, A&T Machining will do it right the first time for you.  I think Andrew may have even shed a tear at the functional aesthetics of the parts.

Starts With a Screwdriver

We believe in taking stuff apart.  The sleek black cases and blank displays that house our everyday gadgets are but simple walls in the way of greater understanding.  Each circuit board is a lesson in functionality, and each wire has a tale to tell us.  All we have to do is peel back that outer layer to begin learning.  And the black boxes of magic that constitute our daily technology are not simply abstract functions of silicon and copper, they are machines every bit as real, tangible, and greppable as plums in pudding.  They are real, and the functions which they execute are fundamentally entrained to the laws of the universe that we observe around us every day and take for granted.  Technology just bends those laws into new configurations in the pursuit of Useful Uses, the same goal we endeavor to meet when we’re designing products from small 2-wheeled robots to large interactive fleets of autonomous vehicles.

But it all starts with a screwdriver and an unwillingness to let broken electronics die easily.  In stripping down these old and forsaken parts we are reclaiming the very human cleverness that went into their design as well as maximizing their value by reusing the parts we find.  Growing up, the rule for me was that I could take apart anything that broke.  I remember clearly the sheer heft and intricate coils of a vacuum cleaner’s motor surprising me greatly, while the simplicity of a broken dishwasher disappointed me by being mostly packaging.  I could pontificate upon how the act of taking things apart relates to human potential, but it would be a lot of hot air in the face of the fact that taking things apart lets us be powerful over a complex world.  By taking apart a broken toaster we can better understand how it works, by dissecting the old cellphone that ruled our social life for the past 2 years, we assume a better mastery of its abstraction.

This is why we do Wrecklab.Makelab events.  Not just because its fun to dismantle discarded complex objects, but because doing so lets us pass on the joy that Andrew, Bilal, and myself have all found in the hacking apart of things.  By questioning, by searching for answers, we cease to be simple consumers of information, we cease to be lectured students, and we start to be scientists and teachers.  By hosting these events, we are trying to communicate that sense of curiosity and gall against seeming complexity to new minds who might have otherwise never dared.  Going out and doing it for yourself, making something new that the world has never seen before, is more powerful than reading libraries or consuming movies.  It isn’t just fun, it’s liberating.

Try it!

Detroit Maker Faire

Two weeks ago we ran around Ann Arbor frantically gathering as much electronic detritus as possible. Old computers, cell phones, printers (strangely abundant), modems, typewriters, scanners, and radios. We managed to accumulate about 350lb of cast away electronics. It wasn’t enough.

We rolled these forsaken electronics into the Detroit Maker Faire early Saturday morning and laid out tools and eye protection. When we put up the sign for Kid Robot’s Wrecklab: Hacking 101, we were immediately swarmed. We set this up with the intent of letting kids rip apart old electronics and learn about how they work in the process. It worked, worked so well and so far beyond our expectations that our junked electronics pile was running dangerously low within 3h, so we had to send out a scout to grab more.

After that, we began to more carefully regulate the rate at which electronics were torn apart, only introducing “fresh meat” to the pile of furiously hacking kids when they’d reduced the previous part to its bare components. And then, if they could tell us what it was and how it worked, they could take it home as a prize. Lasers went fastest and motors were a close second, leaving shiny heat sinks and geared assemblies behind.

It was barely controlled chaos, and we spent most of the weekend reminding kids to wear goggles and changing screwdriver bits for them. Unfortunately, although we brought along tools to remake things out of the scavenged components, no one was much interested in the soldering irons or hot glue guns. However, the event was nonetheless an unqualified success with delighting children, parents, and Maker Faire editors alike.

At the end of the event, as Eepy Bird’s presentation of the Diet Coke & Mentos show captivated most of the fair-goers, we found ourselves faces with a daunting pile of electronic bits that the kids thus far hadn’t wanted.  In a stroke of brilliance, Bilal climbed the nearby cardboard tower with a microphone as people began to filter towards the exit and began proffering up bits of electronics for free souvenirs and creating competition for the scattered PCBs and keyboard keys leftover on the tables.  Suddenly, “K”, “M”, and “Page Down” keys became valuable and the typewriters and speaker boxes quickly disappeared into happy hands while vintage 1992 through-hole circuit boards became coveted.  It was amazing to witness the sudden revaluation of what had been torn apart as junk into sentimentally valuable memorabilia, and it was a fitting end to an event that will hopefully help change Detroit’s popular image for the better.

Instrumental Stress Relief

Bilal and I know how to play music. Andrew doesn’t. Fortunately, that doesn’t stop him from trying.

Bilal and I have brought instruments into shop, laying upstairs for when we need to let thoughts percolate in our head. More often than not, this translates into going upstairs when we’ve reached a wellhead of frustration on a given project, and we bang that frustration out in music. Lately, this has primarily been on a double bass I’ve rented from a local music store and a cello. And double basses are big, as in so large that we could all comfortably kayak down the river on top of it.

But it’s not just the musical aspect of these instruments that is intriguing. We build things out of silicon and metal and nylon bearings and bits of data. These instruments are made of wood, and the engineering paradigm that goes into them is completely different than anything we’re used to. Wood is…bizarre. Aside from 2x4s and plywood, there’s no real standardization of wood quality, it all depends on the tree it came from and how it grew and how it was harvested and treated. To be sure, there are also several different grades of steels and aluminums due to different manufacturing processes, but not nearly with the same finely nuanced variation as instrument wood. Every double bass or cello is different, whereas we can design metal mechanicals that roll off much more nearly the same. Simply put, it’s the art of the organic that is fascinating in the cello and double bass.

We strive to achieve artful awesomeness in our design principles, but we’re working with a pot of standardized parts shared by thousands of electrical and mechanical engineers. We don’t have to select the temper or grain of the wood for the tone we hope it will produce, so instead we have to balance aesthetic elegance and utilitarian interfaces. In a respect, engineering is sort of like music in that we are using the powerful tools around us to call forth things into the world that have never been there before. And that is fundamentally awesome.

Electronics Library

Lately we’ve all been sitting quietly hunched over our respective terminals wading about deep in the fetid, but oh-so-powerful, bowels of Altium. For those who don’t know about Altium, it is a program developed specifically to develop electronic circuits and take it all the way from sketching out a circuit to printed circuit board development and through to manufacturing considerations and bill-of-material exporting. Before this, we were using Diptrace, which, frankly, was a lot more intuitive to use but not nearly as extensive. But it’s also this very extensiveness of Altium that has led us each to headaches. Altium has so many layers and so many functions and so many command dialogues that it is difficult to jump in. Even though we’ve been working with the Altium Wiki or tutorial files open, we’re still running our heads into walls of frustration. We’ve yet to figure out how to set constraints on the PCB auto-routing feature or how to get wires to move with their assigned pins in schematic mode, but at this point we’re annoyed enough and have spent too much time to just walk away from the program and back into the squishy arms of Diptrace. I mean, even their technical support interface is strangely complicated, which makes me suspect that it was designed by a civil engineer.

However, we’re coming into the curve. We’ve managed to design a couple circuits with multiple ICs in schematic mode, and we’re quickly figuring out how to route the traces on the PCB manually. Bilal has designed us a new business card, although he has been tinkering with the PCB layout for about 14h now, and Andrew is working on a new digital signal processing module while I am building better 3D models of our components in Autodesk Inventor. Eventually, once we figure out the idiosyncrasies and nuances; Altium will become a fluid and valuable asset to us, especially since we’ve been mounting our component libraries in our server cloud for remote access. It seems there is good reason Altium offers training classes on its software, but we maintain that the best way to learn is to just go and do it.

Whiteboard Space

Lately we were lamenting the lack of whiteboard space that we have in the new office.  We tend to draw massive flow charts on any surface available to document our ideas and brainstorm new ones, so being confined to just 1 small whiteboard was rather frustrating in general.

However,  yesterday we had a breakthrough:

Turns out that all the nice windows on 2 walls of our development laboratory can be safely written upon as whiteboard space!  This is excellent, because now we have a place to publicly argue about math!

RRI Office Reconstruction!

So the office is being hacked apart to celebrate and to make room for the purchase of a new pick and place machine! This should help us increase our productivity by a large margin! In addition we are complementing this with a gantry robot for loading. This will solve our long lead times for product as we will be able to build all of our items in house and not have to wait on batch orders.

Down go the walls! We are moving the door around the corner and extending the wall so the new machine fits.

Robotics Redefined in O’Reilly Radar. Make-offs: DIY indie innovations

Andrew Archer, who grew up in Duluth, Minn., was unhappy and unchallenged in high school, but his mother noticed how he would bring things home from yard sales and go into the garage and take them apart. She encouraged him to participate in robotics programs outside of school and he found something he loved — building robots that could do complex tasks. His experience solving challenges for robotics competitions led him to start a robotics company when he was 17. Today, Andrew is 22 and Robotics-Redefined is building customized robots using off-the-shelf components to transport inventory on factory floors. Last year, he moved to Detroit because he had begun selling his robots to the auto companies. In Detroit, he found hackers who were interested in helping him build robots. He began training hackers himself to do what he needed. At a demonstration, I saw his autonomous orange robot move around a test track and approach a heavy item, pick it up and relocate it. Archer told me his robot was a more sophisticated version of a Lego Mindstorms robot.

One of the upgrades is a vision system using a webcam to detect if people are in the path of the robot. If the robot is bumped or pushed off its path, it can reorient itself and get back on track. It could also communicate with other robots doing the same work. All the while the robot was busy, it played a chiptune from one of Andrew’s favorite Nintendo-64 games. This industrial robot was a serious piece of work, built for a harsh environment, but its goofy 8-bit music showed that a really geeky kid was its maker.
As Andrew and other young makers become more familiar with the equipment used in industry and science, they will see new opportunities to build “knock-offs” using cheaper, reusable components that are open and adaptable to customization. We shouldn’t consider them “knock-offs” as we talk about what’s produced in China. As “make-offs,” they stand-out as examples of creative DIY innovation and collaboration. Make-offs are open platforms for doing new things, enabling more people to participate and develop the expertise to solve new and more challenging problems together.

Read The full article here